Harnessing Emotional Intelligence for Effective Allyship

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Jessica: Hi. Thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection podcast. I’m Jessica, and I’m joined today by Dr. Anne Phibbs, founder and president of Strategic Diversity Initiatives. Anne has over 25 years experience helping organizations advance their equity, diversity, and inclusion goals. She’s a trainer and a teacher who has delivered hundreds of workshops and classes for thousands of participants in corporate, government, higher education, nonprofit, healthcare, and faith community settings. Today we’ll be talking about using emotional intelligence in our allyship, and Anne will be sharing a practice with us. Hi, Anne. How are you?

Dr. Anne Phibbs: Hi, Jessica. I’m great. I’m very glad to be here.

Jessica: We’re excited to have you. I love emotional intelligence. I also teach on it, so I’m so excited to hear about using it in our allyship. Let’s get into it. Let’s learn more about using emotional intelligence in our allyship. Could you tell us a little bit more about it?

Anne: What I’ll do, because I am a storyteller– I believe that stories are a lot of the ways that we remember things and connect things as a teacher, as a trainer. Sometimes I teach teachers or I do train the trainer, and I always say to people, it’s good to use everything at our disposal, statistics. I’m a philosopher, so make arguments by analogy and all that kind thing. What people will often take away and remember are the stories. I hear that from the people I train all the time. I know it’s true for me too. I love television. I love movies. Why do we love that? Why do we love soap operas and silly things sometimes is because a couple of reasons.

One, it’s stories, but stories are emotional. They’re connecting us to parts of us that we all share, which is to be human is to be someone with deep emotions. Now, whether we actually acknowledge those and whether we know how to deal with them is another thing. That’s emotional intelligence. I’m going to start with two quick stories of examples of how having just a really great analysis or being the smartest person in the room. I come from higher education where there are a lot of people who feel like they’re the smartest person in the room. Sometimes they are, and they often have a great analysis. I always say those two things are not enough for leadership, they’re not enough for allyship.

These are examples of where someone could have used more emotional intelligence. I’ll start with doing a training. I’m doing a training with a group of people in another state. It’s a virtual training. There’s someone who was a really great advocate. They were very smart. This person happens to be a transgender man. He’s in this organization, and he’s saying good things, but I will tell you, hands down, he’s one of the angriest people I’ve ever trained in my life. He wasn’t necessarily angry at me, but at one point, when his supervisor, and he said– I knew this man was his supervisor, he called out his supervisor in front of everyone.

In this way that there was no relationship, there was no even like, “I’m feeling frustrated.” It was just a lot of blame, a lot of shame. I came away going– You could literally feel how people who work with him feel about him. You could just feel people pulling back. I thought, “He’s a great advocate. He’s an ally. He’s very smart. I imagine he’s probably faced a lot of trauma and a lot of pain and oppression for sure by being trans because there’s so much transphobia, and it keeps growing.” At the same time, his effectiveness was extremely limited by the fact that he couldn’t control his anger. That’s the primary thing that he presented with. There was no opening for people to disagree with him or to work with him.

The other piece I’ll share is something that’s not so verbal but still had a profound effect. I was working with a colleague who is African American woman, and we were doing a program together around leadership. We were interviewing people who were going to be in our leadership program around DEIA. There was a white man and he said great things. He very much was an ally. He’d done really good things in the industry we were working in, but in this 30-minute interview, I noticed he never once looked at my colleague. I was doing the kind of thing where you are doing this, looking at your colleague, trying to give him like, “Hey, you’re only looking at me.”

When we got done, I turned to my colleague and I said, foolishly, “Did you notice?” The first thing she said, “Of course, I noticed that he couldn’t even look at me.” I thought, “Here’s an example, again, of a lack of emotional intelligence. You’re not connecting with her. You’re not recognizing that, of course, she’s noticing. What’s the message you’re sending? Now maybe you’re nervous. We don’t know.

“Certainly what we can read knowing the history of racism and that racism is alive and well for my Black colleague is you don’t take me seriously. You don’t think I’m as important as Anne who identifies as white like you do. Whatever it is, even though it’s subtle, even though it’s nuanced, and even though it’s nonverbal, you’re sending a really big message.”

In both these examples, you’ve got messages being sent around emotions that are really limiting your effectiveness at building relationships, at showing up as a ally and a leader. What we know emotional intelligence is, is simply the ability to recognize and acknowledge and manage our own emotions, which I think sometimes sounds easier than it is, and also to recognize and influence the emotion of others. I want to be clear, not the word manipulate. It’s not manipulating people but influencing the emotion of others.

At its core, emotional intelligence is two things, knowing what I feel, paying attention to it, figuring out what to do with what I feel. Whether I’m feeling angry, sad, competitive, playful, creative, resentful, these are all emotions. We often think of the big three, sad, mad, glad, but really there’s so many ways that we have nuanced emotions constantly. It’s noticing it, and there’s a lot of reasons I can talk a little bit later about why we don’t notice, some of which is about trauma and things like that we grew up with. Then there’s, okay, now I know what I’m feeling, what am I going to do about it? Then how do I use my understanding of feelings to motivate myself to achieve things that are important to me?

There’s that piece. Then the other piece is, how do I relate to other people? Because we are fundamentally social beings. How do I show empathy to others? How do I have the social skills to be in relationships that are effective and that are not always happy but that are authentic relationships, which becomes really important when we’re doing DEIA work? One big difference between emotional intelligence, which is also called emotional quotient, so I’m going to shorthand it as EQ, that’s where the Q comes from, is it’s similar to IQ, which is intellectual quotient?

Now, the big difference between EQ and IQ is that EQ is not fixed. That’s why I talk about it. If it was something that was fixed and you could never change it, then we don’t need to delve into it. Supposedly IQ is like that. EQ is something where we can develop these skills around understanding, managing our emotions, and then the social skills and empathy we bring into our relationships. It is something that we can build on and improve. Part of the reason that I really focus on it is because I’ve had experiences.

I’ll share one more quick story. This is from, gosh, many, many years ago, in the early ’90s or mid-’90s. I’m at Metro State University. I’m not outing anyone. This person is long gone. There was a person I worked with who was a huge ally to the LGBTQIA community. That’s the work that I did there. This was really important. This is 25 years ago when there were fewer allies. I also noticed she was very smart, had a great analysis, very committed to justice and equity. I also noticed that she made a lot of people angry, and she did not have strong relationships. At the time, I did not have– I didn’t say, “Oh, she could use more emotional intelligence.” I didn’t know that concept.

Now, looking back, that’s part of why she was less effective, part of why it was hard for people to work with her, part of why she didn’t move up in the organization, and things like that. Now that I’m actively doing DEIA work, I realize how important it is because this work is fundamentally not just intellectual work. This is about identity. It’s about who we are. It’s about how we grew up. It’s about privilege, which we have already talked about. These things are deeply felt.

Jessica: Old trauma.

Anne: There’s going to be a lot of trauma. Absolutely. There’s going to be a lot of emotion. The more that we can see ourselves as EQ as a part of our work, I think the more effective we’ll be in whatever we’re trying to do as a ally and a leader.

Jessica: Yes, I’ve seen some really profound things happen as I’ve taught EQ for a while. I had a guy in my leadership class. He worked on a highway crew, and EQ had a pretty big impact on him. He told me, “I don’t yell at my guys anymore. I don’t yell at my crew anymore. I used to yell at them all the time because that’s what I learned. That’s what my dad did. I went into construction and that’s what always happened to me. I was yelled at all the time.” He’s like, “But that’s not who I am, and that’s not who I want to be. I don’t yell at them anymore.” I think that’s a huge impact on not only himself but on the people that he was yelling at and stopped yelling at.

Then their families, of course, it has this ripple effect. I think some of the really interesting things about EQ are that we all have different things that might come a little more naturally to us than others. In my case, it’s harder for me to know exactly what I’m feeling, and it is partly from past experiences, and et cetera, that have affected my ability to do that. Also, I’m always adapting to everyone else in the room and not paying attention to and tending to my own emotions and needs. Other people are much better at that. We all can be stronger or not as strong in different areas of EQ. It’s great that we can build it all. [chuckles]

Anne: Yes, exactly. I just want to say, that’s a very powerful story. I had something similar where a guy told me, the senior leader said, “I’m an equal opportunity and I don’t like to swear, but I’ll just say a-hole.” That’s what he said. “I yell at everyone.” This is when we’re presenting him with assessment data that shows that he has huge problems with morale in his company. Surprise, surprise. I also love that part of the story you told is, this is what I was taught, this is what happened to me, and that we need to literally teach that there’s another way. Actually, all the research shows it’s a better way.

Every bit of research shows that bullying and a lack of psychological safety, I can’t say what I really feel for fear of being fired, or not listening to people or not caring about how they’re feeling or taking their personal experience into account, that doesn’t keep people in jobs. It doesn’t keep people happy. Even if they stay in jobs, what we know from the bullying data, fortunately, a lot of people have not been bullied, but the data shows that 75% of employees have witnessed it and been around it and that negatively impacts people.

What happens is people check out, they don’t show up, they leave jobs. It’s really not a good way to be a leader. That’s what I love about EQ. That’s what I love about DEIA, and all of this is that it’s never too late to say, “Oh, I could do this differently.” I had a guy come up to me when I had shown this whole– I’d done this training about EQ, and I’d shown this model that I had been trained on. There’s like 15 different components of EQ. He said, “I’m bad at all of it.” That’s what he said to me.

Jessica: I know. I’ve heard that from people too, and I congratulated them.

Anne: Yes. Then I said, “Okay. Well, there’s nowhere to go but up.” Right?

Jessica: Yes, exactly. Like, “Great. Let’s move on from here then. You know where you’re starting.”

Anne: Yes. [laughs]

Jessica: Let’s talk about that. What does it look like when someone does not have well-developed EQ? You’ve given some examples already.

Anne: Yes, there’s a number of things, and it’s not all the same. Someone could have lower EQ and not be necessarily a bully or not be yelling all the time. Things like caring about what is important to you, speaking up for yourself, and setting boundaries, is a way of showing emotional intelligence. I have someone in my life, great person, who is a little bit inclined. I can’t imagine that, especially talking to you, Jessica, as a Midwesterner, that you don’t know someone like this, who acts a little bit out of obligation. I asked this person, “Would you be willing to do this thing for this thing I’m planning?” They said, “Yes.”

Now, I had a sense that maybe they didn’t want to do it, but I asked and they said yes. Then when they did it, I could literally feel their resentment. Have you ever had that experience? The first thing you’re saying is, “Why did you say yes?” Because I am allowed to ask, but you are allowed to say no. I think this is especially true around gender. For a lot of women, we’ve been taught to people-please, to make sure everyone’s okay. We’re going to bring that extra dish to Thanksgiving or we’re going to, “Yes, I’ll sit with your kids,” or whatever it is, even though actually that doesn’t work for me.

The fear is if I set this boundary, I’ll look selfish instead of saying, “Whatever you perceive of me is not my problem. I get to set my boundary.” That’s emotional intelligence, but that’s not necessarily aggression. The other thing is, we’re really good at passive aggression in the upper Midwest as well. There’s a lot of ways for me to not be overly aggressive but to let I’m not okay without being direct. Another way that it plays out that I had experienced within a workplace is negativity. I worked with someone who, I’m not kidding, every single thing they talked about was negative. At some point, who doesn’t work for a state agency, a local organization, a nonprofit, a company?

Let’s face it, if we want to look for what’s wrong, we can find it. That glass half empty, half full. One of the things that comes out of EQ is that we need a certain optimism but not a Pollyanna optimism, not the kind that says it’ll always be okay because it actually won’t always be okay. The kind that says, we can be resilient. We can get through this together. That becomes particularly important around DEIA because when you’re looking at 400-plus years of racism in this country, when you’re looking at the hundreds of years of misogyny and still seeing it play out in our social settings and in our workplaces, microaggressions, ableism, homophobia by transphobia, it’s very tempting to be negative.

Similarly, to the person in my first story, the person who had a great analysis but was constantly angry, you can’t move things forward. No one follows a leader who says, “Oh, this will never work. Follow me.” That just doesn’t make sense. Obviously, someone who is self-centered, self-absorbed, I’m going to talk all about myself.

I have a colleague who has someone that they work with who is a delightful person but never knows when to stop talking, to the point where my friend is trying to leave for a meeting and this person is just taking no emotional cues and so put my friend in this position of having to set boundaries. That’s a sign of a lack of emotional intelligence, not knowing what are other people needing around me.

Jessica: That’s interesting because that tells me that there’s a bit of an interdependence within EQ. There’s the being able to know your limits and your boundaries and communicate them. Then there’s also not putting someone in the position where they have to push back a little bit or being at least more aware of other people and what you’re asking them to do.

Anne: I agree that because we’re social beings, and we’re doing our work with other people. That means we’re going to come up against different ways of understanding the work, different approaches, different styles, and even different concepts of what the work is. How are we going to be able to navigate that? If either we’re someone who in every instance pushes our way through, or in every instance backs up and just rolls over, neither of those is good for teamwork. We need to be able to push on each other and still stay in relationship.

This is another piece. I sometimes think about emotional intelligence as the ability to hold onto ourselves when things don’t go the way we want. I had a situation where someone had said something biased to someone else in a workplace and the two people who were involved had a conversation. There was an apology, and the two people moved on. The one person who made the biased statement came back to the other person and said, “I really need you to forgive me.” The other person said, “Well, I’m done talking about this.” They set a boundary and said, “I don’t want to talk about this.” It was very, very challenging for the person who made the biased comment. They wanted forgiveness.

I hear from the supervisor who says, “I’ve got this problem with these two people. Can you help?” I said, “Yes, I can help, but you don’t have a problem with two people, you have a problem with one person.” The person who set the boundary and said, “I accepted your apology, but I’m not going to talk about it anymore. I’m not going to say I forgive you. I don’t want to do that,” they had the right to do that. I don’t think anyone owes us forgiveness. What I did with the supervisor was reframed it as a opportunity to develop emotional intelligence in their colleague who wanted that forgiveness and who got wrapped up and couldn’t move past it.

“Now all of a sudden, I can’t work with this person because all I can think about is they won’t give me this thing I think I need.” Emotional intelligence is also about emotional maturity. I think about kids who are like, “I want this, I want this, I want this.” At some point you’re like, “Oh, I hope they get old enough to realize they can’t eat candy all day long or they have to go to bed,” or whatever. The same thing in the workplace. Yes, you might want your colleague to give you exactly what you need to be settled with this, but just because you need it doesn’t mean you’re owed it.

Jessica: Why do you think that EQ is important when we’re doing DEIA work? You just brought up a great example. Can you give some other examples about what using EQ might look like as we’re trying to act from an equity and inclusion lens?

Anne: Yes, absolutely. Part of why it’s so important is because when we’re doing equity work, particularly when we have some privilege, it might be because we’re white, because we’re male, because we’re heterosexual, cisgender, we don’t have a disability, we grew up middle-class, et cetera, grew up speaking English, the likelihood that we’re going to know exactly how to act with everyone who is marginalized, oppressed, underrepresented, whatever word we use, that in every situation we’re going to get it right, is slim. This work is about making mistakes. Part of what happens is we have deeply emotional responses when we make mistakes. We often go to shame.

It doesn’t help if then possibly we’re dealing with someone who’s also really good at blaming. When I teach on emotional intelligence, I use a great clip. If you just Google RSA Brené Brown blame, this clip will come up. There’s also one RSA Brené Brown empathy. In the clip about blame, Brené Brown is talking about how blame is the opposite of accountability. She says we know this from the literature. Blame is merely the discharging of discomfort and pain. It’s like this emotional outburst, but it doesn’t build relational accountability, and so part of what we need when we’re doing this work.

Let’s just say– and this is true for me. I’m a white person. I have made racial microaggressions many times in the past. I’ve done it recently. I will continue to do it. I believe that part of my white privilege is that I will make mistakes like this. It’s going to be tempting the minute that happens for me to feel badly, to center myself, to feel shame, and then to need something from the other person. “Oh, this is where you forgive me? Will you tell me I’m still an okay white person?”

The fact of the matter is, there’s a lot of really good reasons why somebody might not want to do that. For example, a person of color and or a Native person might say, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” or, “I don’t need to make you feel better,” or, “This is the fifth time I’ve had to deal with this comment in the last month and I’m done. Who takes care of me?” Part of the work of emotional intelligence with DEIA is to hold on to ourselves emotionally to know, “I’m still a good person. I still can know who I am and go into the work knowing I will make mistakes, knowing I will probably create some harm I didn’t intend to create, but that I can learn from it.

“That some people, most likely the majority of people I meet who have marginalized identities, queer folks, people with disabilities, women, unidentified people, people of color and Native people, most of them are going to stay in relationship with me, but someone might not. That doesn’t have to destroy me. It doesn’t have to slow down my work as an ally and as a leader. Even if somebody says, ‘I’m done having this conversation with you, Anne, because I can only spend so much energy educating white people.'” I’ve heard people of color say that to my face, but also in all sorts of other contexts.

It’s different kind of work because we have to find it in ourselves to hear that and stay in the work even if it’s messy, even if we didn’t get exactly what we needed emotionally because when we’re new with stuff, we’re going to make mistakes. The emotional intelligence allows us to slow down and go, “Okay, what am I feeling? Oh, I feel horrible. How is my feeling horrible still centering me in this?” To push back and go, “Oh, I wonder what my colleague’s feeling. I wonder what it does feel like to have to have this conversation they just had with me over and over again.”

It’s not just like, “I’m learning coding or I’m learning a technical skill and someone just told me I got the technical skill wrong.” That doesn’t often tug on us the same way someone turns to us and says, “You have tremendous privilege as a white person and maybe that’s connected to your PhD.” Suddenly I’m like, “What? I worked hard. I think I’m smart.” I would say, and I think I said this on the previous podcast, those things are true and it helps that I’m white. Because that’s another piece is emotional intelligence is connected to identity. Who are we? Who am I in the world? How do I feel about myself? Do I feel proud of myself? Do I feel good about myself?

Then suddenly, what does it mean to start to realize that as someone who doesn’t have a disability, there’s tremendous barriers I will never face until I have a disability if I live long enough and one develops, which might happen? I will just tell you this as someone who just had knee replacement surgery, and suddenly for the first time in my life, and I’m 61, suddenly saw the world through the lens of access in a way I never had before. Can I get on a plane? Can I drive my car? Can I access this? What will I look like when I’m accessing it? What will people think about me?

Thinking, “Oh, it’s nice that I had 61 years before I ever really had to think about physical access in the same way. I wonder, what is the emotional toll of facing that all the time?” People with disabilities face that lack of access, barriers, ableism, constantly, and not just physical, but attitudinal barriers as well.

Jessica: There are those internal processes that can go on, what am I feeling and reflecting? I’m wondering also, what does EQ then look like when you are in those relationship management pieces of EQ?

Anne: One of the first steps, Jessica, is acknowledging it. Here’s where emotional intelligence helps in everything in the workplace, including DEIA, and particularly in relationships involving things like supervision and management. Let me back up and say, the other thing about emotion, and then I think I’ll connect this, is that we have put emotion in the purview of the feminine. Literally the fact that we refer to emotional intelligence as a soft skill, the sexism in that because we know there’s hard science and there’s soft science, and we know which one is harder or better. The same thing. If you ask–

Jessica: Engineering is always better than–

Anne: Exactly, than psychology, right?

Jessica: Right.

Anne: Which is the purview of men and the purview of women. Now, I know that it’s not hard and fast rule. I talked to a lot of people, managers, supervisors, particularly if they’re men, who were never taught that emotional skill is part of managing people. Guess what? Being able to manage emotions is absolutely essential for developing relationships, moving teams forward, and particularly if you add in conflict and things that arise because of racism and sexism and things like that. What happens is we say I’m good at the technical stuff and there are rules, aren’t there? I just tell people do unto others, the golden rule, or something like that.

37% of managers do not like to talk about anything with the people they supervise, not just challenges, but if you add in problems with their performance, it goes up to 70%. Guess what? You have to figure out how to have these conversations. It doesn’t work to just say, “Well, I grew up in a family where we never talked about anything.” Yes, there’s a lot of people like that, but guess what? I told my team, “Hey, here’s the harassment policy, knock it off and work with each other.” It doesn’t work like that because now Sue and Tim or whatever, are constantly at it and it’s affecting everyone. What you keep doing is telling Sue and Tim privately to fix it.

It doesn’t get fixed because you’re not willing to go in there and do some emotional work. What happens in the workplace, I think this is true in the classroom and other social settings, is we see emotion as somewhat dangerous and scary. I’ve had people say to me, “I don’t want to be–“

Jessica: Weak.

Anne: Yes, exactly. I’ve had people say to me, “I don’t want to be a therapist.” I’m like, “There’s a huge difference between being a therapist and being an emotionally intelligent leader, teacher, team member.” We are so primed to not talk about things because we’re somehow worried things will blow up. What we have to do is get over ourselves and go, “Yes, you know what? Actually, emotion is not a bad thing. Emotion drives all sorts of wonderful things like friendship and creativity and innovation and hard work. Have you ever been on a team where you’re working so hard but everybody makes you laugh and you all of a sudden realize three hours went by and you love these people?”

Most of us hopefully have some experience where, but you’re still working really hard but because you’re connected and you’re able to move together in a way, even if you’re different, it’s not the same hard work. Emotion is a really good thing. Sometimes even tough emotion is a good thing because we need to get it out. We come from a culture where that’s women’s work, or, for example, Black people come into our workplace and they’re the ones bringing all the heavy feelings. They’re always angry. The stereotype of the angry Black woman is unfortunately alive and well in workplaces, in all sorts of social settings. Guess what? Everybody gets angry, even white people, even white women.

Suddenly a white woman cries and everyone’s worried about her, but the Black person over here, who’s frustrated and angry, we’re not taking care of. That’s the DEIA lens we have to bring to all our emotional work. Who gets to have feelings? Whose feelings do we care about? Whose feelings scare us? How can I pay attention to the messages I got about different people having different emotions?

I’ll just end with this, a couple of things. The word hysteria, as I’m sure you know, hysteria comes from the Greek for woman. The prefix of that is the Greek for woman. Think about what that means when suddenly we’ve got rooms filled with men or rooms filled with women. What are our expectations around emotion? Guess what? Men feel every bit as much as women. The fact that we don’t let them talk about it is a huge damage to boys and to men. The fact that we assume that the province of feeling and emotion is women, it’s a detriment to everyone, people of all genders.

We need to see it as profoundly human. The more I can understand it and help shape that for my team or my colleagues, even if I’m not the leader and be a role model. I can be a role model who’s like, “Yes, I’m angry today, but I’m still in relationship with you.” Or, “I’m having a hard day. I’m sad today, but I can still hear how you’re doing.”

Jessica: I love this. Let’s drill down some more into what are some things we can practice, some things we can do, to grow or increase our EQ? Then how can we tell when we’ve improved our EQ?

Anne: I found a reflective practice that I’m sharing five effective self-reflection exercises. Really a lot of it is starts with noticing. Depending on what works for you, there’s journaling, there’s mindfulness meditation, there’s emotional journey, reflective questioning, and seeking feedback. I’ll start with the first four, which are just whatever it is, if you can take a few moments, if you can as a practice every day to just stop and go, “What am I feeling?” To your point, Jessica, and this is true for me and others I know, it’s not always easy to identify what we’re feeling.

For me, I grew up in a minister’s family, we were supposed to look perfect, identifying anger has been a challenge. Guess what? One of the wonderful things about anger is it tells us something’s not okay. When we can identify that we’re angry, actually a really good thing to know. It doesn’t mean we’re going to blow up our friendship. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to scream at someone. It just means something’s going on for me that I need to pay attention to. Part of it is just starting to identify our feelings.

I’ll tell another quick story. I am someone who desperately does not want to believe that I’m competitive. The problem is I am. I’m doing this silly trivia game with my wife and two friends, and it’s a video thing. I’m just going to say it, I told you I don’t like to swear, but I was an a-hole. I was horrible. My wife and I were on the same team. She came away good for her, and she said, “Well, I never want to play that game with you again,” because I was horrible to her, She said, “At some point, you just might want to pay attention to the fact that you actually are quite competitive.”

Because I wouldn’t recognize that in me, I kept acting poorly. The next time we did something, we played a game, I turned to her, I said, “How did I do?” She said, “You did much better,” because I don’t want to be a jerk to my wife or to any other human. I wasn’t even seeing it because I was caught up in this. I have the ability to change that behavior, but the first step is noticing that I’m even doing it, and what’s the emotional connection? Oh, it feeds something in me to be competitive. Okay, so now I can shift that. I do. I go into games– just the other day I was playing dominoes, and I went into the game going, “Chill out,” and I did.

The next time someone says, “Oh, you know what? You’re a great listener.” That is emotional intelligence feedback. That’s feedback about how you’re doing. When someone says, “I can never tell when you’re angry,” that’s actually the most feedback around emotional intelligence. When someone says, “I feel like you cut the meeting short and didn’t give everyone a chance.” if we’re paying attention, we’re actually constantly getting feedback about how we are in relationship, and a lot of that’s about emotional intelligence. Nothing’s to stop you from turning to a colleague, a friend and saying, “Hey, how do you think I handle conflict?” Whether this is at work or–

The other thing is people often say they feel like their emotional intelligence shifts between work and home, and I think that can be true. It might not look the same at home as it does at work or in other settings. Say in a work setting, to be able to say to a colleague, “I just got put in charge of this team, and we’ve had three meetings, and you’ve been in those meetings. Can I get some feedback? Do you feel like I’m creating enough space for everyone? Do I feel domineering? Am I too dialed back? Are there things I could do to encourage people to share more?” People typically are willing to help you out when you’re that vulnerable.

This is about vulnerability. Part of emotional intelligence is about saying, I’m human. I have feelings. I sometimes mess up. I’m vulnerable. We have not connected vulnerability and leadership in our culture. Partly it’s a sexism thing, partly it’s we have this idea that all leaders are decisive, competent, strong, and never show weakness. Actually, that’s not good leadership. I’ll just say this. We know from the research, people are looking for two things from their leaders. They do want competence. They also want warmth and empathy. We’re starting to learn that that emotional skill is central to any leadership but also very central to showing up as an ally.

Jessica: Those things are not mutually exclusive, but we’re not talking about two different people here.

Anne: Yes, exactly.

Jessica: You can have all of those things in one person.

Anne: Yes. All you have to think back to is probably a great teacher, a great boss, a great coach, a great leader. Someone who mentored you in some way, likely had both of those qualities. You had to know that you matter to them and that they cared about you. They also had to have some knowledge base they were sharing with you. Even saying to someone, “I’m working on my emotional intelligence,” for some people that might be loaded, but you could practice that.

You could just take a colleague that you really trust and say, “I’m thinking sometimes that I’m shut down at work or that I’m too edgy or that I don’t share how I’m really feeling. I’m trying to work on that. Can I check in with you? Can I take you to coffee every month and we could talk about it?” Or, if you prefer, you could do the journaling, taking notes, just noticing things. I mentioned that I had the knee surgery and things are much better today, but I had a real problem. I was in significant pain yesterday that I was not prepared for. It ruined my day. It was just so challenging.

First off, I had to show myself some compassion, but I was really struck by, I could not think my way out of it. It affected how I viewed my work, my day. I’m lucky I have privilege. I was able to call my doctor. I was able to get in to see someone this morning. I have a tremendously supportive partner. I’m appreciative and grateful for all of that. What I was struck by is that the feeling of pain, which was both physically difficult but also very frustrating for me, that was going to trump everything in that moment. When we’re working with others to realize there might be emotional stuff that’s going to trump what they need from you or what you need from them, and that’s where we show that empathy and compassion.

I don’t know anything about– I’ve never lost a parent, but I know you just found out your dad has cancer and suddenly the whole world shifted for you. That’s some emotional stuff. If I don’t help deal with that right now, it doesn’t work to go, “Well, Jim, that’s hard.” The best thing to do is just focus back on your work. Let’s face it, am I right? That’s what we’ve been taught. Let’s just get Jim focused back on his work.

Actually, how about you say, “Jim, do you want to sit here for 20 minutes and tell me about your dad? If you don’t, that’s fine. If you do, I’d love to hear about it or just what you’re feeling.” To start to say, actually, that could help Jim have a much better day than just pretending that emotional stuff is not in the workplace. There is no firewall. We’re deeply emotional people.

Jessica: Thank you so much for guiding us through that, how to improve our EQ. That’s it for this episode. Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend. We’ll be back next week with a practice for building accountability and managing pushback. Until then, keep practicing.

Kalin Goble: The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, US Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, US Department of Defense, under award number 2023-48770-41333.

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